Related papers: Encyclopaedia Inflationaris
An epoch of accelerated expansion, or inflation, in the early universe solves several cosmological problems. While there are many models of inflation only recently has it become possible to discriminate between some of the models using…
I review the general aspects of cosmological parameter estimation from observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies in the framework of inflationary adiabatic models. The most recent CMB datasets are…
This paper is aimed to study the compelling issue of cosmic inflation during rapid oscillations using the framework of non-minimal derivative coupling. To this end, an anisotropic and homogeneous Bianchi I background is considered. In this…
There is solid theoretical and observational motivation behind the idea of scale-invariance as a fundamental symmetry of Nature. We consider a recently proposed classically scale-invariant inflationary model, quadratic in curvature and…
We construct a class of single small field models of inflation that can predict, contrary to popular wisdom, an observable gravitational wave signal in the cosmic microwave background anisotropies. The spectral index, its running, the…
Measurements of CMB anisotropy and, more recently, polarization have played a very important role allowing precise determination of various parameters of the `standard' cosmological model. The expectation of the paradigm of inflation and…
The simplicity of the CMB data, so well described by single-field inflation, raises the question whether there might be an equally simple multi-field realization consistent with the observations. We explore the idea that an approximate…
The value of the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ in the region allowed by the latest $Planck$ 2015 measurements can be associated to a large variety of inflationary models. We discuss here the potential of future Cosmic Microwave Background…
Is there new physics hidden in the four-point function of the cosmic microwave background (CMB)? We conduct a detailed analysis of the Planck PR4 temperature and polarization trispectrum for $\ell\in[2,2048]$. Using the theoretical and…
The standard big bang cosmological model and the history of the early universe according to the grand unified theories of strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions are summarized. The shortcomings of big bang are discussed together with…
We present the implications for cosmic inflation of the Planck measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies in both temperature and polarization based on the full Planck survey. The Planck full mission temperature data…
Future astrophysical datasets promise to strengthen constraints on models of inflation, and extracting these constraints requires methods and tools commensurate with the quality of the data. In this paper we describe ModeCode, a new,…
Inflation has been the leading early universe scenario for two decades, and has become an accepted element of the successful `cosmic concordance' model. However, there are many puzzling features of the resulting theory. It requires both…
I give a general review of inflationary cosmology and of its present status, in view of the 2013 data release by the Planck satellite. A specific emphasis is given to the new broad class of theories, the cosmological attractors, which have…
The early universe according to the big bang and the grand unified theories is discussed. The shortcomings of big bang are summarized together with their resolution by inflationary cosmology. Inflation, the subsequent oscillation and decay…
We introduce a new method for applying an inflationary prior to a cosmological dataset that includes relations between observables at arbitrary order in the slow roll expansion. The process is based on the inflationary flow equations, and…
Space-based missions studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have progressively refined the parameter space in conventional models of inflation shortly ($\sim 10^{-37}$ seconds) after the big bang. While most inflationary scenarios…
The observational status of inflation after the Planck 2013 and 2015 results and the BICEP2/Keck Array and Planck joint analysis is discussed. These pedagogical lecture notes are intended to serve as a technical guide filling the gap…
In these lectures I review the present status of the so-called Standard Cosmological Model, based on the hot Big Bang Theory and the Inflationary Paradigm. I will make special emphasis on the recent developments in observational cosmology,…
Inflationary cosmology has become one of the cornerstones of modern cosmology. Inflation was the first theory within which it was possible to make predictions about the structure of the Universe on large scales, based on causal physics. The…